This Ain’t No Archive, It’s An Echo: Black Womanhood and Sonic Identity

-- By SelahWilliams - 20 Feb 2025

A Bird’s-Eye View

In contemporary music, Black women have continuously redefined and expanded the boundaries of sound, using their voices, bodies, and technologies to create sonic landscapes that challenge traditional conceptions of identity. Afrofuturism, as a cultural and artistic movement, provides a critical framework for understanding how Black women use music, especially electronic and experimental genres, to forge new identities and futures. Through their engagement with technology, specifically machines and electronic tools, Black women are able to reclaim and reimagine what it means to exist, both in the present and in speculative futures. These sonic practices work as both acts of resistance and expressions of Black futurity.

Afrofuturism for Sonic Exploration

Afrofuturism is a lens through which Black people, particularly Black women, explore alternative realities and futures. Emerging in the late 20th century, Afrofuturism combines science fiction, speculative fiction, and Black cultural expressions to envision new possibilities that reject the limitations of the present. For Black women, Afrofuturism offers a platform to envision identities beyond the constraints of colonialism, patriarchy, and racial capitalism. In the context of sonic exploration, Afrofuturism becomes a means to experiment with new soundscapes, technologies, and narratives.

Kodwo Eshun’s concept of “sonic fiction” illustrates the potential of sound as a tool for building new realities. In his seminal work More Brilliant than the Sun, Eshun argues that sound, and by extension electronic music, functions as a form of storytelling that can break from traditional narrative structures. For Black women, sonic exploration becomes a way to create speculative worlds—worlds in which they are central, in control, and free from historical oppression. As Eshun suggests, sound is not merely an aesthetic form but a vehicle for creating alternative identities and futures.

The Black Woman and the Machine

Historically, technology has been a site of both marginalization and empowerment for Black communities, particularly Black women. Electronic music, with its emphasis on machines and digital tools, allows Black women to not only engage with technology but to master it and reshape it to suit their own needs. Instruments such as synthesizers, drum machines, and digital audio workstations (DAWs) become not just tools for music production but extensions of the self—an embodiment of Black women’s creative agency.

For Black women, using machines to create sound is a way to reclaim technology from a history of exploitation and control. Drum machines and samplers, often associated with electronic genres like techno, house, and hip-hop, allow Black women to manipulate sound in ways that challenge traditional modes of musical production. These machines become instruments of power, granting Black women the ability to control the sonic landscape and, by extension, their own narratives.

Fugitive Sound

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the lives of Black women who defy the expectations imposed upon them by colonialism, patriarchy, and the state. These women, often labeled as “wayward,” are seen as deviant or unruly because they refuse to conform to conventional norms of respectability. For Hartman, these "wayward" lives are not lives of disarray, but rather lives of radical possibility and self-determination. In the case of Black women’s engagement with electronic music, sound itself becomes an act of resistance, much like the “wayward” lives Hartman writes about. In the context of electronic music, the refusal to adhere to traditional musical forms—often by manipulating technology and sound in non-conventional ways—mirrors the subversion Hartman describes. These Black women’s sonic practices act as a radical reimagining of identity, much as the wayward lives are a reimagining of societal expectations.

Hartman’s notion of “beautiful experiments”—unpredictable and disruptive acts of Black self-expression—aligns with the experimental nature of electronic music. Just as the wayward lives in Hartman’s book create new forms of Black existence outside of traditional structures, Black women in electronic music use sound as a space to experiment with who they are and what they might become. The "waywardness" of their sonic practices opens up new futures and spaces for self-definition, challenging both patriarchal and colonialist histories. These experimental sounds become not just a form of personal liberation but an affirmation of Black womanhood that defies societal constraints.

Black Political Imagination and Sonic Practices

Shana Redmond’s work on Black political imagination underscores the role of music as a tool for political expression and social change. Redmond argues that music is not merely an aesthetic pursuit but a crucial component of Black political movements, linking sonic practices to broader struggles for justice and equality. For Black women, electronic music becomes a space where the personal and the political intersect. The sounds they create are not only expressions of selfhood but acts of resistance that challenge systemic oppression. Redmond’s focus on the connection between music and political imagination illuminates how Black women use electronic music to expand their political and social possibilities. The futures imagined in their music are not just speculative; they are a call for change, a vision of what could be if Black women were free to shape their own destinies. Electronic music, as a subversive form of artistic expression, reflects larger struggles for Black autonomy and self-determination.

Conclusion

Through their engagement with electronic music and sound, Black women have developed a powerful tool for identity-building and resistance. The relationship between Black women and machines, framed through the lens of Afrofuturism, allows for the creation of sonic landscapes that challenge historical narratives and offer new possibilities for the future. By integrating the theoretical perspectives of Kodwo Eshun, Daphne Brooks, Shana Redmond, and Saidiya Hartman, it becomes clear that Black women’s sonic exploration is not just an artistic practice but a form of political imagination and resistance. As Black women continue to use technology to expand the boundaries of their identities, they are crafting new futures that are more liberatory, creative, and autonomous.

Notes

Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. Quartet Books Limited, 1998.

Hartman, Saidiya V.. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. First edition. New York, NY, W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.

Redmond, Shana L. Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora. NYU Press, 2014. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qfdpd. Accessed 19 Feb. 2025.

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